Under the Skin

This post is part of The Film Experience's excellent Hit Me With Your Best Shot series. 

HMWYBS is always a fun exercise because it  allows me a chance to really analyse shots within a film. But this time around, with Jonathon Glazer's Under the Skin, it was also an opportunity for me to really enjoy and appreciate a film that I had not enjoyed the first time around in the cinema. When I first watched Under the Skin, I was with my boyfriend, and having not really read much about Glazer's stylistic choices, we were both expecting something a bit more ... shall we say ... action packed and less cerebral.

For someone who loves film and wants others to enjoy it too, there's a special responsibility I feel when I  pick a film for others to see. Is it the right kind of film for the occasion? Are you both in the mood for this type of film? Are they gonna like it? When the film began with a 2001-esque birth sequence, I knew that this not going to be a standard narrative and adapted my expectations. But could my boyfriend? I felt a mild anxiety that he would just walk out, knowing how much he disliked slow meandering films like this. To his credit he stayed to watch the whole movie, but has since described it as the worst movie he's seen (this year). I, on the other hand, think it's one of the best of the year, a singular movie not like much else available, one that feasts in sights and sounds to create the alienating experience.

Upon watching this again, I had the good fortune of my boyfriend being on a week-long work trip. I watched the movie in the comfort of my own solitude, the eerie silences of the film echoing the unusual emptiness of our apartment. Not only did I not have to worry about whether someone else was enjoying the film, but I was also able to feel a special connection to the alienation and loneliness felt by Scarlett Johansson's character. Like this alien seductress trying to understand the world and the sensory stimuli around her, I too was seeking out the meanings and beautiful shots in this film.

Without a doubt, the images in this film are beautiful to look at, and with Glazer's leisurely pacing it's pretty easy to feast in these images. For beauty alone, there would be many shots to choose from. But from an emotional point of view, there were a few that grabbed me the most, and one in particular. My favourite shot occurs just after the middle of the film, in a sequence that tells so much narratively with perhaps 5 shots. After she has taken the man with neurofibromatosis and fed on him at her house, she walks down the stairs, and stares at herself in the mirror, itself lit like a dark silhouette of herself.

While she never communicates what is going on in her mind, it is clear that she is fighting some moral quandries within herself about killing the sweet vulnerable person she just met. She suddenly hears a noise from the hallway, and looks to see a fly buzzing against the window, trying to escape.

I'm sure this will become one of the definitive "viewing an animal changes someone's perspective" scenes, just like Queen Elizabeth and the stag in The Queen.

The next shot, my favourite, is an extreme close up of her left eye. The white light coming from the glass in the previous shot is reflected in her pupils, and it's a beautiful image.

It's also the pivotal  point for the character. We already knew she had a curiosity with this world's living things because of her examination of the ant at the beginning of the film. Now, having gotten to know all her victims as part of her seduction, she now has some empathy for them. I think in this moment, she relates to that core desire of all living things - the desire to survive. Something, compassion perhaps, develops in her mind and burns in her heart, as loudly as the fly's buzzing and as bright as the light behind the glass. It's enough for her to deviate from her job to unknown consequences. This shot beautifully frames her eyes as the entry point for the external stimulus that leads to her internal transgression.

What makes this shot transcendent for me is that it also captures the magic of cinema itself. Here she is, an individual in the dark, a witness to the story of life before her, a story projected from a light source far away, piercing right through her retina and into her consciousness. That is exactly what I hope to experience every time I go to the cinema.